The Sun's Financial Diary

Do you watch Jim Cramer on Mad Money? Do you follow his recommendations on what to buy and sell? If so, how are those recommended stocks are doing? Gurus like Jim Cramer and Suz Orman are often seen on TV offering their advices to audiences on where to invest their money or how to handle [...]

Looks like the Wall Street doesn’t have too much confidence in Barack Obama. Why? The day after he won the presidential election, November 5, 2008, the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 486 points. Today, the day Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of the county, the Dow tumbled 332 points, the worst inauguration [...]

This isn’t what I asked for when I started to buy Bank of America (BAC) shares through their DRIP program at ComputerShare (ComputerShare reviews). I was going after their dividend. At $1.29 dividend payment in 2008, BAC made a small, but nice contribution to my passive income last year. But it doesn’t look like that [...]

When I first learned that Nortel Networks (NT) has sought bankruptcy protection this morning via @MarketWatch on Twitter (you can follow me on Twitter), I wasn’t really surprised (OK, a little bit). Wasn’t it just a month ago when reports came out that the company was seeking legal advices for a possible filing? Though NT [...]

Are you investing in quality, dividend paying stocks, either by buying individual stocks or investing in dividend oriented mutual funds or ETFs (exchange traded funds)? Why Invest in Dividend Stocks? If you are not, then I ask you to take a look at this chart from the S&P. It’s the cumulative return of $1 invested [...]

So what happened to the Wall Street? Where will it go from here? Today, The Wall Street Journal released a 3-part video documentary series, End of Wall Street, with in-depth coverage of the financial crisis started in the summer of 2007. Following is the first part of the video, What Happened.

With the stock market as volatile as it can be, I decided to take advantage of stocks’ slump recently to make a few quick bucks. I had a “play account” at Zecco to make speculative stock purchase (sadly, that account is close to nothing right now), but this time I am using Scottrade instead because [...]

A month ago, I wrote a post on asset allocation where I discussed the importance of having a diversified portfolio that consists of various asset classes. The reason for doing that is quite simple: as we have long believed, diversification can mitigate risks. When I was building my virtual all-ETF portfolio a while ago, I [...]